we would not have shown that all plays have such an effect, or that the
plays we think are the best (as works of art) have such an effect.^37
Justice
Thefinal defence for the theatre as the school of morals is that it shows
justice being done. Put simply: plays show virtue rewarded and vice
punished. Hence they have considerable power over a world in which this
so evidently fails to happen. What’s more, the idea that your wrongdoing
will later be punished is central to Christian theology and, subsequently,
to the Kantian moral tradition.^38 Plays which show virtue rewarded and vice
punished–‘poetic justice’,asitcametobeknown–are therefore educating
their audiences with regard to a central tenet of moral understanding, at
least according to one highly influential worldview. Hence, the theatre is
a better place to learn about the rewards of virtue and the horrors of
vice–in Schiller’s words:‘in its [theatre’s] fearsome mirror, the vices are
shown to be as ugly as virtue is shown to be lovable.’^39
Thefirst and most obvious objection to the claim of the theatre to show
justice is that it simply doesn’t. The failure to show virtue rewarded and
vice punished can occur in two different ways:first, virtue is punished
(or not rewarded), vice is rewarded (or unpunished); second, it’s not clear
who is or is not virtuous. There is a further division to be made in the second
case between (1) plays that are ambiguous about who is virtuous and
who isn’t and (2) plays in which the question of virtue and vice simply
doesn’t arise.
First, then, wefind candidates for successful plays in which vices go
completely unpunished. One might think ofThe Winter’s Tale, in which
Leontes, in afit of jealousy, attempts the murder of both his childhood
friend and his daughter, and indirectly causes the death of his son and, so
he thinks, his wife. In the end, his wife forgives him and they are
reconciled. Elsewhere, wefind virtuous people (perhaps with minor faults)
punished severely. In Racine’sPhèdre–which Racine defends explicitly
on grounds of moral instruction–Hippolyte is cursed by his father and
dies after being attacked by a sea-monster – a slimy, coiled, scaled,
yellow, horned, bellowing bull-dragon; this, for the crime of loving
someone he shouldn’t. InKing Lear, the vicious sisters Goneril and Regan
certainly die; but then so does the virtuous Cordelia.^40
Second, theatre can fail to show virtue rewarded and vice punished by
not showing, with any clarity, who is virtuous and who is not. Büchner’s
Danton’s Death, in which questions of virtue explicitly arise, might be said
to fall into this category. And in Molière’sThe Misanthrope,the question of
just who is virtuous and who is vicious proved one of the central problems
of interpretation–an ambiguity that may have contributed to the play’s
A school of morals? 111